A small KiwiSaver provider is standing by its cryptocurrency offering, despite the recent downturn for the digital money.
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Kōura recently launched the country's first green crypto fund, which invests in Bitcoin and offsets the high carbon emissions associated with the asset, through the purchase of carbon offsets.
But it has come at a time when Bitcoin has lost more than half its value from its peak last November.
Kōura managing director Rupert Carlyon said like all investments, crypto is a long-term game and too much has been invested for it to fail.
"I would be very surprised if the large institutional investors pulled back permanently from here. I mean you look at a company like Fidelity who we're investing with, they have spent many, many hundreds of millions of dollars building custody platforms and ways in which institutional investors can access these products.
"We've seen that across the entire industry ... and that's because people do see the long term potential in these products."
Carlyon said he struggled to see how the current market crash would cause all of that work to unwind.
He said the recent crash was "definitely not cause for panic".
"This is really what being a crypto investor is all about unfortunately, it's a product which is highly volatile and experiences significant ups and downs."
Carlyon said it was still early days for crypto, similarly to how the Internet was in its early days when the dot-com bubble burst.
"There's no question that at that point in time, the market got ahead of itself and ... it was pricing users and no one really had a clear revenue model.
"You look at Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, three of the largest companies in the world at the moment [and] they had all went through that period and now have come out the other side."
He said what it showed was the value of long term thinking.
